Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Map of Byron's Switzerland
- Part One
- 1 Heading for Geneva
- 2 The Shelley Party
- 3 On the Road
- 4 First Meetings
- 5 Diodati
- 6 Frightening Tales
- 7 A Narrow Escape
- 8 Chillon, Clarens and Ouchy
- Part Two
- Afterwords
- 1 Lewis, de Staël and ‘Poor Polidori’
- 2 The Shelley Party and Allegra
- 3 The Road to Greece
- 4 Last Rites
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - First Meetings
from Part One
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Map of Byron's Switzerland
- Part One
- 1 Heading for Geneva
- 2 The Shelley Party
- 3 On the Road
- 4 First Meetings
- 5 Diodati
- 6 Frightening Tales
- 7 A Narrow Escape
- 8 Chillon, Clarens and Ouchy
- Part Two
- Afterwords
- 1 Lewis, de Staël and ‘Poor Polidori’
- 2 The Shelley Party and Allegra
- 3 The Road to Greece
- 4 Last Rites
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
With all his luggage, and his fellow travellers, Byron's arrival at the Hôtel d'Angleterre could hardly have been discreet and Claire Clairmont, on the qui vive as she must have been, was very quickly aware of it. She saw his entry in the hotel register and sent him a note saying that she was sorry he had grown so ancient although, from the slowness of his journey, she might have concluded he must be two hundred years old. ‘I suppose your venerable age,’ she wrote, ‘could not bear quicker travelling’. This was late on Saturday. Instead of getting in touch with her immediately, Byron spent the period after his breakfast on the following day swimming in the lake with Polidori and he then took the calèche he had bought in Brussels into Geneva where he picked up his mail – he was disappointed not to have heard from Hobhouse about when he would be coming to join him – and did a little preliminary house-hunting. This explains an angry note which Claire wrote early on Monday morning. In the letters she sent to Byron in London, she had been keen to stress that she would make no demands and to assure him that ‘in all things you have acted most honourably’. But now she asked how he could be so inconsiderate. She had waited, she said, ‘in this weary hotel for a fortnight & it seems so unkind, so cruel, of you to treat me with such marked indifference’. What he should do, she continued, was go up to the landing on the top floor of the hotel at 7.30 that evening and she would make sure she was there to conduct him to her room. In a letter Byron wrote to Augusta Leigh towards the end of his stay in Switzerland he assured her that, in spite of all the rumours which had been circulating in England, he had had only one mistress during the summer and that he had done all he could to discourage the relationship with her; but, he added, ‘I could not exactly play the Stoic with a woman – who had scrambled eight hundred miles to unphilosophize me’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Byron in GenevaThat Summer of 1816, pp. 27 - 35Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2011